Supply chain management is the management of the flow of goods and services. It includes the movement and storage of inventories of products. Such products can be stored for retrieval by pick workers, autonomous robots, or customers in logistics facilities, such as distribution centers or retail stores. Each type of item is known as a stock keeping unit (SKU), and each SKU has one or more locations where it is kept. These items can be stored openly on shelving racks, or in compartmentalized containers, such as boxes or bins.
Items are often stored in sealed cases in a wholesale center. In such centers, individual units are packed together in a shipping case, as when they are received from a manufacturer. Cases can further be grouped together and stored on pallets, which is common for freight shipments of goods.
The process of breaking the cases or pallets for individual product picking, that is, taking the individual pieces from the case or pallet and placing them in a specific storage location in a facility, is called put-away or replenishment. The process of picking or selecting individual items from a specific storage location in a facility is known as piece-picking or each-picking. Put-away and piece-picking happens in both distribution warehouses and retail centers, whereas case-picking or pallet-picking typically only happens at a wholesale distribution center.
A fundamental problem with piece-picking and other related operations is that the manipulation and automation of products within in the supply chain requires detailed information about the product to support high quality product identification. This information can include such things as the weight, width, height, depth and images of the package. Such information can be critical information for shipping, storage and manipulation of the boxes, cartons and pallets of goods. Shippers also need this data in order to charge customers correctly to ship the package, to understand how to pack their trucks or to store the packages.
Scanners have been used within the field of supply chain management. However, scanners have had a limited role in scanning moving boxes, containers, crates and cases of product, not product pieces. Moreover, these scanners have not been 3D scanners because the applications of such scanners have been limited to applications involving hobbyists, gaming, and other commercial applications.
Hobbyists can use 3D scanners to produce 3D models for the purpose of 3D printing a duplicate or a modified version of real world items. Hobbyists can scan faces or human bodies and produce 3D models of the person to recreate a 3D printed model of said person. The output of these scanners are simple 3D models without higher-level knowledge of the scanned item.
Game and virtual reality (VR) designers use 3D scanners to produce models of objects, small and large, for inserting into their game or VR worlds. In this case a photorealistic version of the item or product is desired, however little more is needed to fit into their game or VR world.
Accordingly, there is a need for a high speed method and/or system that can obtain a full set of attributes required for autonomous product manipulation in a supply chain when working at the piece level.